Interview with Daniel D. O'Neill

HARFORD LIVING TREASURE DANIEL D. O'NEILL
DO = Daniel D. O'Neill DW = Doug Washburn
DW Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 20 November 2012. I'm with the Harford Living Treasure, Daniel D. O'Neill of Bel Air.
DW Good morning, sir. DO Good morning to you.
DW I'm glad to meet you. So, tell me what year you were born.
DO I was born the 17th of October 1931 in the Women's Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. DW Ok. Where were your parents living when you were born?
DO We were living on Williams Street, 14 North Williams Street, in what is now the Mann House.
DW Ok. The Man House is used for today?
DO It is used for a half-way house for alcoholics.
DW Ok. Ok. What did your dad do for a living– what did your mom and dad do for a living? DO Well, my mother was a homemaker–
DW Ok.
DO …and my father was of all trades. He started off as an auto salesman. He first established The Motor Sales and it was in the twenties and it was in the blacksmith's shop up on the corner of Bond Street and Bel Air Road where the old Kunkel's was and is now the parking lot for the Harford County office building. Then Motor Sales moved to up Bond Street to where the M & T Bank parking lot is and then when he sold it to Herb Hannah it
moved across the street to where Motor Sales was during much of the '40s, '50s and '60s, and is now located on Route 1 down at Benson as Bob Bell's Chevrolet. Then he went into the banking business and he was a cashier a year in the Second National [Farmers & Merchants National]Bank and during the Depression, they closed the banks and five years later he worked to merge the Farmers and Merchants National Bank with the Second National Bank to become the First National Bank where M & T is on Office Street.
After many of his children got their college degrees in the early '40s, he went to the University of Baltimore and got his law degree, sixty some years old, and he practiced law the rest of his life.
DW I knew he was a lawyer but I didn't realize he was that old when he became a lawyer.
DO Also, when he left the bank in 1935 he started an insurance business as well and operated that while he was a lawyer.
DW And in the late '40s he became a Maryland State Senator.
DO Maryland State Senator and served for at least one term in Annapolis.
DW Forty-seven to '50 is what I found on the Internet, as what he was listed as. Wow! Ok.
I never knew and had never heard any name that preceded Hannah and Motor Sales together so that was very interesting. That was very interesting. (Chuckles) And for our listeners, Motor Sales in the '50s and '60s would have been where the Mary Risteau Courthouse is today.
DO Correct. And it was a Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Cadillac dealership.
DW Yea, absolutely. Bought a couple cars there. My parents bought a couple of cars there.
So, did you know your grandparents? Either maternal or paternal?
DO My paternal grandmother died when my father was three years old and my grandfather, John B. O'Neill died before I was born as well as Thomas Hall Robinson died in the late '20s. It may have been 1929. I'm not sure of the date. I knew my grandmother and knew her up until I was about sixteen years old. She died, I think, in 1948. They lived on Broadway, now where the Cassillys live. Where I think it's where Bob Cassilly lives, near Franklin Street. Just two houses toward Hickory Avenue from Franklin Street.
DW Ok. Now your grandfather Robinson– his full name was Thomas Hall Robinson and he was…
DO Attorney General for Maryland during the '20s. One of the interesting things was in 1970 [1917] or 1917 or 1916, he helped procure the original ground for Aberdeen Proving Ground and it was not as large as it is now. It ended where the firehouse is on the main part and then it was expanded before or during World War II.
DW It was about 35,000 acres there, I think, of farmland and another 35,000 acres of marsh. DO One of the treasures was Spesutie Island was part of that acquisition.
DW Isn't Spesutie where they did a lot of the artillery testing?
DO They did a lot of bombing. In fact, I had an office building [that] was the old tower for the bombing range on Spesutie when I worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
DW On your mother's side, you had a grandfather that was associated with St. Ignatius?
DO Yes, if you go back to my great-great-great grandfather Humphrey Wilson, he was most likely one of the attendees at the opening of St. Ignatius Church in 1792. And that began a long line of my association with St. Ignatius and through that lineage of Humphrey Wilson, I am related to Dr. Dick Streett, the Pooles, and to Larry Wilson and his father, Kent Wilson who was up at Forest Hill Bank.
DW Yep. Downtown Forest Hill. DO Yes.
DW Same times as Harry Heaps. Now I see the Streett with two t's, so that's obviously the northern Streetts.
DO And it's Dick Streett the veterinarian.
DW Oh, ok. But he would be the same line as Col. John Streett up on Holy Cross Road. DO That is correct.
DW That's a beautiful property today.
DO And on my father's side, history goes back to 1795 when my great-great-grandfather, Henry O'Neill came over from Ireland and settled up in the Rocks area. My sister tried to do a lot of research but we really couldn't find where the post office was and where he actually settled but that's what we understand: that he settled in the Rocks. His son, John Hardin O'Neill who, my brother's named after him by the way, married Mary Wells Green of Havre de Grace and many will recognize the name Green because there' s Green Street in Havre de Grace and the Green house that real estate agent, Mr. Terry lived in is on the corner of Green and Union Avenue.
DW I know there was a Rocks Post Office on the Rocks Station Road in the later years before it closed but I don't know about anything earlier. (Chuckles)
DO And my [great grandfather] father, when the Civil War came about wasn't happy being near the north so he went to Georgia and he fought in the Confederate Cavalry during the Civil War and even my grandfather lived in Georgia for a while and finally settled in Baltimore.
DW Do you know what your great-great grandfather, Henry, did in the Rocks?
DO No, I don't know that and his father back in Ireland was Owen and the only reason I say that is there are a lot of people figure we're related to the John O'Neill of the lighthouse. My brother tried to do a lot of genealogy and travelled to Ireland, my brother Jim travelled to Ireland oh, six or seven times and actually hired a genealogist to trace our family in Northern Ireland and we could never [make] a connection actually between that John O'Neill and our ancestor, Henry O'Neill.
DW When I was doing the research, I found a lot about that particular John O'Neill. (Chuckles) So what is your earliest memory of growing up in Bel Air?
DO Well, I don't have much memory when I was six and younger. I went to school at St. Margaret's on Hickory Avenue; graduated in 1944 and that was in the original schoolhouse. The four room schoolhouse where we had two grades. The first and second was in one room and the second and the third, or the third and fourth in another room, and the fifth, sixth and seventh in the third room. I graduated in 1944 and then went to Bel Air High School on Gordon Street and graduated in 1948.
DW The St. Margaret's School, that was not located where the current school is, is it? DO Yes.
DW Oh, it is? Ok.
DO Yes. It was located there. I think maybe way back early it might have been across the street but I'm not sure about that.
DW Ok. Well, I have heard other folks talk about the earliest of the St. Margaret's being where the parking garage is…up at Pennsylvania and Hickory?
DO Ok.
DW Ok, but I didn't know whether that building was still standing.
DO I totally recall the little church where the office building is, is what we had, and then the four room school house with an auditorium below.
DW Ok. Now was that, would that have been Sisters.
DO They were the School Sisters of Notre Dame and they wore their habits, their black habits, all starched up, so…
DW (Chuckles) and pretty strict. DO Yes.
DW (Laughing)
DO Yes. Very strict.
DW Do you think that the education, the classes that were offered at St. Margaret's were different than public school or just more stringent?
DO I think that we learned, had a better foundation, like in English we declined sentences and we had…I don't know how to compare it to public school but I know we got an excellent education that I'm not sure that you get today.
DW Yea. (Chuckles) Even in the public schools, of course the seventh grade was all you were required to attend, in the early years, it was later that they went to the eleventh and even later they went to the twelfth. I've seen the graduation tests from the 1880's and very stringent. (Chuckles)
DO I was 16 years old when I graduated from high school.
DW Mmm. Did that mean, were you allowed to skip some grades because … DO No, I was allowed to start when I was five.
DW Oh.
DO Since I was born in October.
DW Ok. Ok, yea, you were young when you graduated. DO I graduated from college when I was twenty.
DW Yea, that's very young.
DO I went one year to Mount St. Mary's and then graduated in 1952 from Loyola College in Baltimore.
DW Hmm. Now when I called you the other day and we were talking, you were talking about you got your driver's license at what I would call a very young age.
DO Right, we had, my father had a farm up on – oh what's the name? – Oh anyway, way up near Forest Hill and Frog Town, that's what they called it. I can't remember the road where the school is now, the brand new school [Red Pump Schoo].
DW Friends?
DO No. The brand new school up in – off of Vale Road – there's a, anyway, we had a farm on that road that led into – I'm having a senior moment–
DW That's ok.
DO Anyway; at that time you were allowed, if you were under sixteen, to drive between farms and so I applied for my license at the age of fourteen. My brother had a 1920 Republic truck with solid tires and a wooden open cab; had to crank it and that's what I learned to drive on.
DW (Laughter)
DO I got my license on a 1931 Model A Ford Coupe; was very easy to park. DW Where did they administer the driving test?
DO The driving test was administered in the Armory and you took your written test there and then you went out on Lee Street and parked. It was every two weeks. You could only go one day– I don't know what day it was but …
DW That was into the 1980's. My children and my wife took their driver's test at the Armory on Lee Street and I'd have to think about how old the kids were but that would have been into the 1980's. Didn't realize it had always been there.
So, let's go back to the living on Williams Street. How did you make extra money? How did you earn money for spending?
DO Well, during the war, the Liriodendron was next door, actually adjoined our property and by that time whoever the caretakers actually wound up leasing the property– that was Clyde Dennis. He farmed it and they raised tomatoes and essentially, I picked tomatoes. You could either do it for 10 cents a basket or 50 cents an hour. And I liked to listen to the stories of Clyde Dennis so I did it for 50 cents an hour and helped him with his cattle and then in 1948 when I graduated from high school, Tommy Brooks, the Town Engineer of Bel Air asked me if I would be willing to help a contractor put in the first parking meters. So Jimmy Hopkins and I were paid 75 cents an hour and we helped this gentleman put in all the parking meters on Main Street. When that contract was over, Tommy asked if I would work for the Town of Bel Air and I did during my early years at Loyola. I did on summers and weekends and at Christmastime during the season. Many of the things I did was run a jackhammer, we layed sidewalks, put in sewer lines. One interesting thing was Ewing Street, the first street as you come up Churchville Road passed John Carroll at Rockfield Park, the first street to the left is Ewing Street and at that time it was gravel. We were going to put penetrating oil– rather than pave it they put
penetrating oil to keep the dust down and we had an old grader which was a horse drawn grader but at that time we were pulling it with a tractor and Curt Akers, the foreman, had graded the street, they came in with the truck and they put penetrating oil on it and immediately thereafter it rained. And the rain put all the oil down in Charles McComas Sr.'s stream there. He had a ram bay below the house that pumped the water up to the house. It was kind of like hydroelectric facility… we had to go in and dig all that oil out of his stream on one of the hottest days of the summer.
DW Now, you're talking about sidewalks. In the write up that I had to work with it said you had to replace slate sidewalks with concrete?
DO I don't remember replacing the sidewalks but I did work on many of the sidewalks, and lay curb and gutters years ago. I'm sure they've been replaced since but many of the sidewalks up and down Main Street, I helped finish.
DW But was there any slate in town at that time? DO I don't remember that.
DW Ok. I see that you also did traffic studies. DO No.
DW No?
DO No.
DW Ok. Well that was in the write-up, too. So (Laughter)
DO Well, maybe that was some of the embellishment that was at my back but I don't remember doing traffic studies but I do remember that I ran the tractor. We had a tractor with an old-time sickle bar mower on it and I would mow the side streets or if some of the people wanted their lots mowed, I did. There was a lot of time when there were
complaints when I would leave weeds and mow flowers since I couldn't tell the difference.
DW (Laughter) My wife still hollers at me for that. So when you picked the tomatoes at the Kelly, at the "Lirio," did they take them some place for canning?
DO Yes, actually, later when I was working with my brother, we hauled tomatoes for Clyde and hauled them to Baltimore. We would take them down to the market on Broadway and then there would be somebody that would buy them and then you would go to whatever canning house. Sometimes there was Lord Mott down at the end of Wolf Street and I remember– this is terrible– the people unloading tomatoes would actually stand up in the middle of your baskets and…so anyway, we went out to Crosse & Blackwell on Eastern Avenue and there when you came home with your truck there would only be just a few spots where a tomato would fall. I would eat Crosse & Blackwell ketchup rather than Lord Mott ketchup. (Laughter)
DW (Laughter) So did the canning houses in Baltimore pay a better price or were the canning houses in Harford County…
DO I don't know why he went to Baltimore or whether the canning houses in say, Streetts' canning house up in Hickory, whether that was still operating or not. I don't know.
DW Ok. Well, let me ask you now, did you use a horse and plow to till the gardens? DO Yes.
DW Ok.
DO We had twenty acres that was in the Town of Bel Air. Where the brick houses are, north of Alice Ann Street, was a five acre field and I had a team of horses and my brother, John, had a team of horses and I remember plowing that field for– I can't remember what
grain he planted in it but... and also my brother and I would do custom garden plowing. I had a wagon and would take my team of horses wherever we went in Bel Air and we would plow gardens. Then one winter, I don't know whether it was colic, but one of my horses got sick and had a high fever and broke his halter and wound up outside the stall and died within a couple days, so I'm left without a horse. During that time, I was getting my teeth straightened down at the University of Maryland on Lombard and Greene Street. You wouldn't do this today but a 14 year-old boy got on a McMahan bus here in Bel Air, rode to the Greyhound Station in Baltimore on Howard Street and then I walked over to Lombard and Greene and they worked on me. When I came out I hailed a cab and took it over to the Baltimore Stockyards, which was over near Monroe Street. I think the cab cost me 50 cents. The guy probably wasn't very happy with me since I didn't give him a tip. It was a horse auction and I bid on a white mare and bought it and looked around and hired myself a truck driver and then brought my horse out to Bel Air. So I think of my grandchildren that I don't even let them– we keep an eye on them here in– when they go in the neighborhood how you would let your 14 year-old boy do something like that today. It's quite an experience.
DW Where did you catch the McMahan bus?
DO I think it was at Richardson's Drugstore, right across the street from Richardson's Drugstore. Not quite in front of Lutz's.
DW Ok. So that would be Pennsylvania and Main, today. I was going to ask you about the bus and I was going to ask you about the railroad. Did …
DO Well, I can remember, talking about earlier, this is one thing I can remember– before the Ma & Pa closed down their passenger service between Bel Air and Baltimore, my mother
and I got on the train and we went to Baltimore and she did her shopping and we came back again and that was quite a ride.
DW I think they closed the passenger around '54.
DO Well, this would have been in the '40s or maybe even the late '30s. Somewhere, it would have been 1940, plus or minus. But you also asked me earlier about memories of my childhood growing up on Williams Street. I can remember that there were a group of boys– there was Joe Foster, of the Foster Funeral Home, lived on Gordon Street; and there was William and Donald Finney who lived on Williams Street beyond Gordon Street and the four of us were kind of a gang. I would go out and be gone all day. We would play Army and I didn't have– you made your own rifles out of wood and if you remember you would get cereal in these little boxes. There would be about ten of them in a big box and they were about the size of a walkie-talkie. So you would take those and take a hanger, cut part of the wire and put it for an antenna and that was your walkie- talkie. So we would have war with, it was Nick Grier and Jimmy Hopkins over on Broadway, that was the other gang and we would have fake battles.
DW (Laughter) Where did your family do grocery shopping in town?
DO There was just one store and that was A & P on Main Street. Then another job I had around the time I was graduating from high school was to work at the old Acme which was down by the Armory. My job was to put produce up. So that was a part-time job I had also.
DW Hmmm. What about clothes shopping? Where did they go for that on Main Street?
DO Well, I can't remember. Of course, you had the Hirsch's Men's Store. I don't know where I bought my childhood clothes. Probably my mother bought them at Hutzler's in Baltimore.
DW Ah, ok.
DO I don't know that for sure but I know she was a Hutzler's shopper. DW (Chuckles)
DO One of the things that Captain Jim mentioned in–was my selling of race programs down at the race track. I was about 13 years old and I worked in the office there at the race track and I had the privilege of selling the race programs and I bought my pencils, cut them in half and put erasers on them. I had the clubhouse to myself. So, that didn't go over well with those that were in the grandstands. I was replaced later on and then I went to picking tomatoes.
DW (Chuckles) How long was the racing season at the race track?
DO Seems to me it was like 10 days, if I remember correctly. It wasn't a long season and then you know, Havre de Grace was operating then because I remember we would get horses from Havre de Grace.
DW Now this was the regular races with the jockeys, not the sulkies.
DO Right, this was regular. And then toward the latter part of the summer they would have the fair.
DW Was it similar to the fairs that we see today on Tollgate?
DO Yea, only it was on the fairgrounds, although, they had all the people bring their baked goods and they would have the horse pulls, instead of the tractor pulls, they would have the horse pulls. And they were judging horses and I can remember they had all these
heavy teams of Percherons and Belgium horses and I took my little ole horse. When they were judging single horses and pulled them up in there. Of course, I didn't get a prize but I …
DW (Laughter) But I would also like to spend some time talking about your siblings who had some service in the county.
DO Let's start at the top. Put the record straight. My older sister is Betty O'Neill and she married Charles McComas who was one of your living treasure interviewees. They lived most of their time on a sailboat between Bel Air and Florida– Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Then the next one is Brother John, who was in the war and he served on a ship as a gunnery officer and then came here and started farming. Initially, the farming was done on our twenty acres. Then he bought a farm on Hall Street, at the end of Hall Street which is now a development near where the Noyes Farm is. Then he bought the farm now which is on Grafton Shop Road, so during his whole life he was a farmer but then he became an auctioneer and then he was the first– before that he was a County Commissioner and then when– I don't know the date– but when we became a Charter Government, he was the first Council President. Then he tried to run for County Executive against Charlie Anderson and, of course, that was during the Nixon years and we know that it was difficult for a Republican to get any office. He probably could have gotten re-elected as the County Council President but not as the County Executive.
DW It was still a close election from what Mr. Mahan wrote up. So who was next?
DO Next was my sister Peggy. She married Buckner Creel who lived up in Darlington and as an aside, my brother, Tom married his sister, Connie Creel. Buck was in the military and spent all of his life so Peggy was a military wife and travelled with Buck. They raised
five children and then Tommy was part of Harford County that would be of interest. When he served in World War II as a meteorologist and actually helped predict the weather for the invasion of Normandy because he was in Wales there at the time. Then when he came home he stayed in the Naval Reserve and was a clerk or assistant for my father when he was down in Annapolis as a State Senator. He was studying for his law degree and he had just a semester to complete when they called him back into the Navy during the Korean War. He elected to stay in the Navy. He couldn't get out of the– he had to join the regular Navy as a Lieutenant or stay in the Reserve as a Lieutenant Commander so he elected to join the regular Navy. He got his Master's Degree in Meteorology and his PhD in Meteorology and retired and lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Then the next one is Jimmy and my brother Jim just passed away at the age of 86 and he was a lawyer here in Harford County. He made Town Commissioner and eventually served several tours as Mayor.
DW Of Bel Air.
DO Yes, of Bel Air.
DW Yes.
DO And then the next one is Nancy and that was my sister and [who lived] with my father and mother progressing in age, Nancy stayed home to kind of help take care of the household there Williams Street till their passing. Then she moved to Holton, Maine, after that. And that brings you to yours truly.
DW Number seven?
DO Eight.
DW Eight? Oh, I miscounted somewhere… oh
DO Betty, Johnny, Peggy, Tommy, oh! I missed one.
DW We missed Harry. That's why I only had seven. (Laughter)
DO I'm sorry. Between Tommy and Jimmy– how could I forget Brother Harry? Harry served in World War II as a Sergeant and he actually fought in the Battle of the Bulge and stepped on a landmine. Fortunately, it was a shoe mine buried in the snow and so it only destroyed part of his foot. But there was some thought that he might lose his leg but he didn't. Then he went to school, law school, got his law degree and he was in with my father as a lawyer and spent his whole life as a lawyer until– and he became a magistrate– when they had the old Magistrate System. Then when they were converted to District Judges, he became a fulltime District Judge in the Risteau Building on Bond Street. He had a farm in Fallston and about 15 years ago, he was one of the first residents of Oak Crest down on Walther Boulevard and still lives there now. He also, while he was living in Fallston, became an ordained deacon at St. Mark's Catholic Church.
DW And then worked at Oak Crest, right?
DO Yes and at Oak Crest he was very active in the diaconate and he unfortunately developed spinal stenosis which made it very painful to walk and when they divided up his duties, it was between twelve and fifteen people that they gave his duties to.
DW (Laughter) Wow! He must have been busy when he was there.
DO I kind of did that too but he claims they were part time; they doled them out to part time people.
DW And the other thing I guess we should have mentioned along the way for our listeners was your brother John, that would be O'Neill Enterprises today in Forest Hill.
DO Yes. And his daughters Aimee and Mary Lou still operate that.
DW Yes and I see that the public service continues with her and she's on the Board of a local, one of the schools. I can't remember which school it is, though.
DO If I may, there's another area I'd like to talk about. DW Please.
DO We started with Humphrey Wilson and being a member of the St. Ignatius Church in 1792 and that has continued down through the years and I am currently a member of St. Ignatius. I had the privilege of being on the building committee for building the new church. Doc Streett and I helped make the week to week decisions with the contractor but our architect brought to us that there were artisans in Peru who made carvings and he thought that we ought to purchase some of our artifacts from there. So we procured a station of the cross, for those that don't know, this is a fourteen picture lighted passion and death of our Lord Jesus. We got the sixth station where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. That was the sixth station. Based on the faith of that one, we paid $500 for it, based on that statue we had carvings of the life of St. Ignatius on the front of our front doors. We have mahogany doors and we have the life of St. [Ignatius] from his birth on, you can follow it in these carvings all the way to his death as you go in the front door. Then we got all the statues, there are four statues: one of St. Ignatius, of the blessed Mother, oh, five! St. Joseph, Mother Seton and the Sacred Heart statue. Then we got a beautiful cross on the front–there's a beautiful cross, about 14, 16 feet tall but almost looks lifelike—a crucifix with Jesus on it. Then, based on drawings that I sent down there, they carved the altar, and the ambo and the lectern and all the chairs. Then the other thing that I think Captain Jim mentioned in his write-up and this was not quite correct, he mentioned the stained glass implying that they came from Peru. They came from Baltimore. We had an
artist who, essentially we looked at about two or three proposals when we were getting our stained glass and the one that impressed us, this fellow proposed having our clere story windows, there are 50 of them. They tell the whole life of Christ through these 50 windows. Then we have two beautiful rose windows and then we have stained glass windows. The design of the windows was taken from the old church. We tried to re- create as much of the old church in the new church as possible. One of my jobs was to see that the architect didn't make it a monument to himself but rather look as if it were built in the late 1700s or early 1800s. The architect essentially designed it as a cathedral. Still today when I go in there, it's just awesome with all the wainscoting and the statues and the stained glass windows. I feel honored to have had some part in the development of the church.
DW The old chapel there is very interesting, too. It's now like a little mini-museum. DO Yes. Well, the chapel is still a functioning church.
DW Mmm hmm.
DO They have Mass in it twice every day. Then to the side of it is where, originally, it may have been the Rectory for that, initially, then it was a school and now it's a museum. A lot of things from the past are displayed there.
DW If I remember right, that's the oldest church in America, isn't it or Catholic Church in America?
DO I think operating. It may not be the oldest but I think it's the oldest operating one. DW Ok.
DO It's on the National Registry.
DW It's a very pretty building. The new building is very pretty, too. You did a nice job on that. So… let me see, as I was setting up equipment and stuff there was one more topic, at least, that I want to have you talk about a little bit.
When you worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground, you were talking about you were there even during the forerunner of the ENIAC Computer. Can you just talk about the changes that you've seen at Aberdeen as far as technology?
DO I went to Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1952, just graduating from college and later in the years, the room that was my office was where the digital analyzer was. I don't think it was operating at that time but some of our main computers was the ENIAC which was the Ballistics Research Laboratories contracted with the University of Pennsylvania, Moore's School of Engineering and Von Neuman was involved with that and that was our first computer. It was operating then when I first went there. Then we had the EDVAC was the next one and it was tubes and it could probably fill about half of this room. It could do not as much as you can do with your little handheld calculators today. It essentially did pluses and minuses and all. [This was followed by the ORDVAC.] Then the last computer that BRL was involved with was called the BRLESC. It was a BRL Electronic Scientific Computer and that was the last one they built that I saw. They got more super computers but they bought them from IBM. Then before I left we had our own personal computers that we finally got, the PCs, and one of the things that, you know it wasn't Al Gore but it was the Army that developed the ARPA Net which was the forerunner to the Internet.
DW The Internet.
DO When we would go on travel, we would have a little computer which was about half or quarter size of today's keyboard. It had an eight line screen with a little keyboard on it and you would have an acoustic device and you would put your phone in it and then you could log onto the computer at Aberdeen Proving Ground and get your email messages.
DW That's pretty good. During your time there, well you spent a lot of time at Edgewood– or Aberdeen, sorry, and I'm not sure what the title of the position was but obviously you had some folks working under you and in the write-up here it says that one of your staff actually testified at the Warren Commission investigation of Kennedy–
DO That was one of my cohorts. He had the Infantry branch and I had the Artillery branch and I remember the day that Kennedy was shot and one day I went into our security office and there was this box. Inside was Oswald's rifle. It was in that box. We would test it to see how many rounds that they could get off.
DW Hmm.
DO But if you're interested I went in in 1952, I went in and worked in the Armored Area and Tank Warfare for three years. Then my deferment became 1A and I had joined the Reserves so I volunteered for active duty and spent two years at Fort Bliss with the Office of Special Weapons Development where we determined the tactics for nuclear weapons and one of the things I remember working on was the damage and safety criteria– how low you could explode a Nuclear Nike Hercules if you had to explode it over the United States. Then I spent a year at General Electric in Philadelphia working on nuclear weapons and then I came back home to Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1958. I was in the Artillery Branch [Special Weapons Evaluation] and worked there where I was a Section Chief and then I became Chief of the Branch. We were the Weapons Systems Lab of the
Ballistics Research Laboratories and they were pulled out and made what one would consider a Weapons Effectiveness Group for the Army. We were the Army Materials Systems Analysis Activity and I became a Chief of AirWarfare Division and for the rest of my career was basically as a Division Chief, Senior Executive, and I worked on things like the Apache Attack Helicopter and Patriot and then in my last three years I transferred– my boss asked me to take over another division– the Reliability Division and then I spent the last three years working on the Reliability of Army weapons. Then I retired in 1986 [1989], and for ten years I was a consultant to Ballistic Missile Defense in Alexandria, Virginia. I retired the second time in 2002 and worked on one of my loves which– I'll have to back up on you now– in 1982, I got my Real Estate License. The reason I got my Real Estate License was my father had property all over Harford County and it was in his estate, this was '82, he died – well, my mother died in 1967, so all that time this land was just languishing there. So, I kind of took the initiative and met with Jimmy, Tommy, and some of my brothers and we decided to put them on the market and I became the real estate representative for the family and help sell all the property. While I was doing this, Brother John says I have my farm I want to sell, why don't you market that too? I happened to be talking to my brother, Harry, who is a lawyer and he said you can't do that. You're selling real estate without a license; if you're working for your brother. So I went off and got my real estate license and practiced part time over the years and I went with Harry Hopkins who is not the Register of Wills, but Harry G. Hopkins in Churchville who was a farmer in Darlington. And with my love of land, I worked mostly on selling land throughout the county. Two recent sales, one was– I think was originally Hackley Reserve and now it's Magnolia Reserve which is a large townhouse
development in Joppa and Perryman Station which is a housing development– apartments for subsidized senior housing.
DW So let's talk a little bit about– obviously land sales, traffic and people and everything as one of the big changes in the county. So, can you talk a little bit about changes that you've seen that you like?
DO The changes that I've seen that I like – no, I see a lot of changes that I don't like. DW Well, ok, that's pretty typical of the folks I talk to.
DO When I first went to work for Harry we had a contract which was a legal paper front and back and now I prepare a contract and they're 40 pages with about a 14 or 15 page contract with all kinds of addendums and you have to almost read a customer their Miranda Rights to tell them that you either work for them or for the seller and that kind of stifles you right off the bat. One of the interesting things that –I also do appraising. And as an appraiser I remember doing some commercial appraising on Route 40 and I couldn't come up with a price. I had all these different comparables and I did the per acre price so I plotted them on a piece of graph paper and low and behold they fit in a straight line and I could pinpoint the price of the land that I was selling. So I started doing appraisals using regression analysis which is a mathematical technique to estimate the price of a property for which you don't have an exact comparable. It particularly works in land sales. Another interesting thing is we were doing the bubble. We would watch the value of houses go up and I would plot those on a graph and they would be going along and then the value would go up and my associate Tim Hopkins said they're going to come back down to meet what was this straight line projection and low and behold today
prices have come back down and are basically on that original glide path of appreciating about 5% a year.
DW That's interesting.
DO The things I guess I do like is when I first went there your listings would be in a yellow box. Everyday would be delivered these sheets, then you would have to put them in folders and keep tabs of them. And today, you have your listings on the computer and we had our tax maps and if you wanted to give somebody a tax map, you had to put it on the copying machine and explode it, essentially, enlarge it. Now I can go on with the program that I have from the State of Maryland and I can get any size tax map I want and can put soils maps on it or contour maps or aerials maps on it. So yes, that's a –the technology associated with real estate is fantastic. In fact, now and I am almost falling behind the times, you have them now on your phones and I'm not quite ready to go there yet.
DW Well, let me see. I think the only thing that I skipped in my list of normal questions and I'd have to back you up at this point is what did you do for entertainment in your youth.
DO Well,
DW Other than playing soldier.
DO Well, I was going to go with modern youths and we've overlooked a significant part of my life. It's last but not least. When I was sixteen years old there were five boys that ran around town. There was Charlie Smith; there was Carl Hamby, Paul Neeper, and Francis Vander Wiele. And we were kind of a group and stayed together, as an aside, ever since because every year at New Years we've gotten together since 1955, even though three of them, unfortunately, have passed away. But Carl and I were good friends and we were
noted for dating sisters. He was dating Lucile Dalton and she got her sister [Mary Ellen] to go out with me and this was on the 7th of May 1950. We went to the Mason-Dixon Speedway for stock car races. Mason-Dixon Speedway is no longer there but it was just over the line on Route 1 going toward Oxford.
DW Ok.
DO Then that was it ever since. We went together for five years and when I was home from basic training and thought I was headed for Ft. Monroe, we were driving down the road and I said– of course, I had given her a ring several years before– and I said, "Let's get married." So that was a Thursday, we were married on the following Tuesday and the next thing we knew when I reported in to Ft. Monroe, Virginia, they said, "Oh, you're the one that's supposed to be in Ft. Bliss, Texas." They had made a mistake on my orders and so the next thing we knew the following week we had an all-expense paid honeymoon to Ft. Bliss, Texas, and we spent two years there. When we came back we went to Philadelphia, then we lived on Eastern Avenue in my brother Jim's house for a year and in 1959, we moved into this house, here on Lakeside Drive and have lived here ever since. We have three children, Mark O'Neill was born in 1957, he's in the radio business and he lives in Marina Del Ray, California. I have a son, Howard, who is an engineer. Started out as Civil Engineer and wound up as an Agricultural Engineer. He worked for a lot of the engineering firms here in town. He lives in West Virginia. My youngest daughter, Mary Lynn, lives in Glenville. One thing of interest there was that they were building her house and my son-in-law's father, his uncle, his brother, my son-in-law and I built their house. It took us about two years to do it.
DW (Chuckles) Very good. Well, is there any other topic that you would like to…?
DO No, I think– I'm willing to answer any questions you have but I think I have covered everything that I had in mind.
DW Well, I think we've gone around the county pretty good and your whole family has certainly made a large contribution to the county. It's been a pleasure, sir.
DO It was a pleasure speaking with you.
DW Okay! I'm going to say thanks very much.

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HARFORD LIVING TREASURE DANIEL D. O'NEILL
DO = Daniel D. O'Neill DW = Doug Washburn
DW Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 20 November 2012. I'm with the Harford Living Treasure, Daniel D. O'Neill of Bel Air.
DW Good morning, sir. DO Good morning to you.
DW I'm glad to meet you. So, tell me what year you were born.
DO I was born the 17th of October 1931 in the Women's Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. DW Ok. Where were your parents living when you were born?
DO We were living on Williams Street, 14 North Williams Street, in what is now the Mann House.
DW Ok. The Man House is used for today?
DO It is used for a half-way house for alcoholics.
DW Ok. Ok. What did your dad do for a living– what did your mom and dad do for a living? DO Well, my mother was a homemaker–
DW Ok.
DO …and my father was of all trades. He started off as an auto salesman. He first established The Motor Sales and it was in the twenties and it was in the blacksmith's shop up on the corner of Bond Street and Bel Air Road where the old Kunkel's was and is now the parking lot for the Harford County office building. Then Motor Sales moved to up Bond Street to where the M & T Bank parking lot is and then when he sold it to Herb Hannah it
moved across the street to where Motor Sales was during much of the '40s, '50s and '60s, and is now located on Route 1 down at Benson as Bob Bell's Chevrolet. Then he went into the banking business and he was a cashier a year in the Second National [Farmers & Merchants National]Bank and during the Depression, they closed the banks and five years later he worked to merge the Farmers and Merchants National Bank with the Second National Bank to become the First National Bank where M & T is on Office Street.
After many of his children got their college degrees in the early '40s, he went to the University of Baltimore and got his law degree, sixty some years old, and he practiced law the rest of his life.
DW I knew he was a lawyer but I didn't realize he was that old when he became a lawyer.
DO Also, when he left the bank in 1935 he started an insurance business as well and operated that while he was a lawyer.
DW And in the late '40s he became a Maryland State Senator.
DO Maryland State Senator and served for at least one term in Annapolis.
DW Forty-seven to '50 is what I found on the Internet, as what he was listed as. Wow! Ok.
I never knew and had never heard any name that preceded Hannah and Motor Sales together so that was very interesting. That was very interesting. (Chuckles) And for our listeners, Motor Sales in the '50s and '60s would have been where the Mary Risteau Courthouse is today.
DO Correct. And it was a Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Cadillac dealership.
DW Yea, absolutely. Bought a couple cars there. My parents bought a couple of cars there.
So, did you know your grandparents? Either maternal or paternal?
DO My paternal grandmother died when my father was three years old and my grandfather, John B. O'Neill died before I was born as well as Thomas Hall Robinson died in the late '20s. It may have been 1929. I'm not sure of the date. I knew my grandmother and knew her up until I was about sixteen years old. She died, I think, in 1948. They lived on Broadway, now where the Cassillys live. Where I think it's where Bob Cassilly lives, near Franklin Street. Just two houses toward Hickory Avenue from Franklin Street.
DW Ok. Now your grandfather Robinson– his full name was Thomas Hall Robinson and he was…
DO Attorney General for Maryland during the '20s. One of the interesting things was in 1970 [1917] or 1917 or 1916, he helped procure the original ground for Aberdeen Proving Ground and it was not as large as it is now. It ended where the firehouse is on the main part and then it was expanded before or during World War II.
DW It was about 35,000 acres there, I think, of farmland and another 35,000 acres of marsh. DO One of the treasures was Spesutie Island was part of that acquisition.
DW Isn't Spesutie where they did a lot of the artillery testing?
DO They did a lot of bombing. In fact, I had an office building [that] was the old tower for the bombing range on Spesutie when I worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
DW On your mother's side, you had a grandfather that was associated with St. Ignatius?
DO Yes, if you go back to my great-great-great grandfather Humphrey Wilson, he was most likely one of the attendees at the opening of St. Ignatius Church in 1792. And that began a long line of my association with St. Ignatius and through that lineage of Humphrey Wilson, I am related to Dr. Dick Streett, the Pooles, and to Larry Wilson and his father, Kent Wilson who was up at Forest Hill Bank.
DW Yep. Downtown Forest Hill. DO Yes.
DW Same times as Harry Heaps. Now I see the Streett with two t's, so that's obviously the northern Streetts.
DO And it's Dick Streett the veterinarian.
DW Oh, ok. But he would be the same line as Col. John Streett up on Holy Cross Road. DO That is correct.
DW That's a beautiful property today.
DO And on my father's side, history goes back to 1795 when my great-great-grandfather, Henry O'Neill came over from Ireland and settled up in the Rocks area. My sister tried to do a lot of research but we really couldn't find where the post office was and where he actually settled but that's what we understand: that he settled in the Rocks. His son, John Hardin O'Neill who, my brother's named after him by the way, married Mary Wells Green of Havre de Grace and many will recognize the name Green because there' s Green Street in Havre de Grace and the Green house that real estate agent, Mr. Terry lived in is on the corner of Green and Union Avenue.
DW I know there was a Rocks Post Office on the Rocks Station Road in the later years before it closed but I don't know about anything earlier. (Chuckles)
DO And my [great grandfather] father, when the Civil War came about wasn't happy being near the north so he went to Georgia and he fought in the Confederate Cavalry during the Civil War and even my grandfather lived in Georgia for a while and finally settled in Baltimore.
DW Do you know what your great-great grandfather, Henry, did in the Rocks?
DO No, I don't know that and his father back in Ireland was Owen and the only reason I say that is there are a lot of people figure we're related to the John O'Neill of the lighthouse. My brother tried to do a lot of genealogy and travelled to Ireland, my brother Jim travelled to Ireland oh, six or seven times and actually hired a genealogist to trace our family in Northern Ireland and we could never [make] a connection actually between that John O'Neill and our ancestor, Henry O'Neill.
DW When I was doing the research, I found a lot about that particular John O'Neill. (Chuckles) So what is your earliest memory of growing up in Bel Air?
DO Well, I don't have much memory when I was six and younger. I went to school at St. Margaret's on Hickory Avenue; graduated in 1944 and that was in the original schoolhouse. The four room schoolhouse where we had two grades. The first and second was in one room and the second and the third, or the third and fourth in another room, and the fifth, sixth and seventh in the third room. I graduated in 1944 and then went to Bel Air High School on Gordon Street and graduated in 1948.
DW The St. Margaret's School, that was not located where the current school is, is it? DO Yes.
DW Oh, it is? Ok.
DO Yes. It was located there. I think maybe way back early it might have been across the street but I'm not sure about that.
DW Ok. Well, I have heard other folks talk about the earliest of the St. Margaret's being where the parking garage is…up at Pennsylvania and Hickory?
DO Ok.
DW Ok, but I didn't know whether that building was still standing.
DO I totally recall the little church where the office building is, is what we had, and then the four room school house with an auditorium below.
DW Ok. Now was that, would that have been Sisters.
DO They were the School Sisters of Notre Dame and they wore their habits, their black habits, all starched up, so…
DW (Chuckles) and pretty strict. DO Yes.
DW (Laughing)
DO Yes. Very strict.
DW Do you think that the education, the classes that were offered at St. Margaret's were different than public school or just more stringent?
DO I think that we learned, had a better foundation, like in English we declined sentences and we had…I don't know how to compare it to public school but I know we got an excellent education that I'm not sure that you get today.
DW Yea. (Chuckles) Even in the public schools, of course the seventh grade was all you were required to attend, in the early years, it was later that they went to the eleventh and even later they went to the twelfth. I've seen the graduation tests from the 1880's and very stringent. (Chuckles)
DO I was 16 years old when I graduated from high school.
DW Mmm. Did that mean, were you allowed to skip some grades because … DO No, I was allowed to start when I was five.
DW Oh.
DO Since I was born in October.
DW Ok. Ok, yea, you were young when you graduated. DO I graduated from college when I was twenty.
DW Yea, that's very young.
DO I went one year to Mount St. Mary's and then graduated in 1952 from Loyola College in Baltimore.
DW Hmm. Now when I called you the other day and we were talking, you were talking about you got your driver's license at what I would call a very young age.
DO Right, we had, my father had a farm up on – oh what's the name? – Oh anyway, way up near Forest Hill and Frog Town, that's what they called it. I can't remember the road where the school is now, the brand new school [Red Pump Schoo].
DW Friends?
DO No. The brand new school up in – off of Vale Road – there's a, anyway, we had a farm on that road that led into – I'm having a senior moment–
DW That's ok.
DO Anyway; at that time you were allowed, if you were under sixteen, to drive between farms and so I applied for my license at the age of fourteen. My brother had a 1920 Republic truck with solid tires and a wooden open cab; had to crank it and that's what I learned to drive on.
DW (Laughter)
DO I got my license on a 1931 Model A Ford Coupe; was very easy to park. DW Where did they administer the driving test?
DO The driving test was administered in the Armory and you took your written test there and then you went out on Lee Street and parked. It was every two weeks. You could only go one day– I don't know what day it was but …
DW That was into the 1980's. My children and my wife took their driver's test at the Armory on Lee Street and I'd have to think about how old the kids were but that would have been into the 1980's. Didn't realize it had always been there.
So, let's go back to the living on Williams Street. How did you make extra money? How did you earn money for spending?
DO Well, during the war, the Liriodendron was next door, actually adjoined our property and by that time whoever the caretakers actually wound up leasing the property– that was Clyde Dennis. He farmed it and they raised tomatoes and essentially, I picked tomatoes. You could either do it for 10 cents a basket or 50 cents an hour. And I liked to listen to the stories of Clyde Dennis so I did it for 50 cents an hour and helped him with his cattle and then in 1948 when I graduated from high school, Tommy Brooks, the Town Engineer of Bel Air asked me if I would be willing to help a contractor put in the first parking meters. So Jimmy Hopkins and I were paid 75 cents an hour and we helped this gentleman put in all the parking meters on Main Street. When that contract was over, Tommy asked if I would work for the Town of Bel Air and I did during my early years at Loyola. I did on summers and weekends and at Christmastime during the season. Many of the things I did was run a jackhammer, we layed sidewalks, put in sewer lines. One interesting thing was Ewing Street, the first street as you come up Churchville Road passed John Carroll at Rockfield Park, the first street to the left is Ewing Street and at that time it was gravel. We were going to put penetrating oil– rather than pave it they put
penetrating oil to keep the dust down and we had an old grader which was a horse drawn grader but at that time we were pulling it with a tractor and Curt Akers, the foreman, had graded the street, they came in with the truck and they put penetrating oil on it and immediately thereafter it rained. And the rain put all the oil down in Charles McComas Sr.'s stream there. He had a ram bay below the house that pumped the water up to the house. It was kind of like hydroelectric facility… we had to go in and dig all that oil out of his stream on one of the hottest days of the summer.
DW Now, you're talking about sidewalks. In the write up that I had to work with it said you had to replace slate sidewalks with concrete?
DO I don't remember replacing the sidewalks but I did work on many of the sidewalks, and lay curb and gutters years ago. I'm sure they've been replaced since but many of the sidewalks up and down Main Street, I helped finish.
DW But was there any slate in town at that time? DO I don't remember that.
DW Ok. I see that you also did traffic studies. DO No.
DW No?
DO No.
DW Ok. Well that was in the write-up, too. So (Laughter)
DO Well, maybe that was some of the embellishment that was at my back but I don't remember doing traffic studies but I do remember that I ran the tractor. We had a tractor with an old-time sickle bar mower on it and I would mow the side streets or if some of the people wanted their lots mowed, I did. There was a lot of time when there were
complaints when I would leave weeds and mow flowers since I couldn't tell the difference.
DW (Laughter) My wife still hollers at me for that. So when you picked the tomatoes at the Kelly, at the "Lirio," did they take them some place for canning?
DO Yes, actually, later when I was working with my brother, we hauled tomatoes for Clyde and hauled them to Baltimore. We would take them down to the market on Broadway and then there would be somebody that would buy them and then you would go to whatever canning house. Sometimes there was Lord Mott down at the end of Wolf Street and I remember– this is terrible– the people unloading tomatoes would actually stand up in the middle of your baskets and…so anyway, we went out to Crosse & Blackwell on Eastern Avenue and there when you came home with your truck there would only be just a few spots where a tomato would fall. I would eat Crosse & Blackwell ketchup rather than Lord Mott ketchup. (Laughter)
DW (Laughter) So did the canning houses in Baltimore pay a better price or were the canning houses in Harford County…
DO I don't know why he went to Baltimore or whether the canning houses in say, Streetts' canning house up in Hickory, whether that was still operating or not. I don't know.
DW Ok. Well, let me ask you now, did you use a horse and plow to till the gardens? DO Yes.
DW Ok.
DO We had twenty acres that was in the Town of Bel Air. Where the brick houses are, north of Alice Ann Street, was a five acre field and I had a team of horses and my brother, John, had a team of horses and I remember plowing that field for– I can't remember what
grain he planted in it but... and also my brother and I would do custom garden plowing. I had a wagon and would take my team of horses wherever we went in Bel Air and we would plow gardens. Then one winter, I don't know whether it was colic, but one of my horses got sick and had a high fever and broke his halter and wound up outside the stall and died within a couple days, so I'm left without a horse. During that time, I was getting my teeth straightened down at the University of Maryland on Lombard and Greene Street. You wouldn't do this today but a 14 year-old boy got on a McMahan bus here in Bel Air, rode to the Greyhound Station in Baltimore on Howard Street and then I walked over to Lombard and Greene and they worked on me. When I came out I hailed a cab and took it over to the Baltimore Stockyards, which was over near Monroe Street. I think the cab cost me 50 cents. The guy probably wasn't very happy with me since I didn't give him a tip. It was a horse auction and I bid on a white mare and bought it and looked around and hired myself a truck driver and then brought my horse out to Bel Air. So I think of my grandchildren that I don't even let them– we keep an eye on them here in– when they go in the neighborhood how you would let your 14 year-old boy do something like that today. It's quite an experience.
DW Where did you catch the McMahan bus?
DO I think it was at Richardson's Drugstore, right across the street from Richardson's Drugstore. Not quite in front of Lutz's.
DW Ok. So that would be Pennsylvania and Main, today. I was going to ask you about the bus and I was going to ask you about the railroad. Did …
DO Well, I can remember, talking about earlier, this is one thing I can remember– before the Ma & Pa closed down their passenger service between Bel Air and Baltimore, my mother
and I got on the train and we went to Baltimore and she did her shopping and we came back again and that was quite a ride.
DW I think they closed the passenger around '54.
DO Well, this would have been in the '40s or maybe even the late '30s. Somewhere, it would have been 1940, plus or minus. But you also asked me earlier about memories of my childhood growing up on Williams Street. I can remember that there were a group of boys– there was Joe Foster, of the Foster Funeral Home, lived on Gordon Street; and there was William and Donald Finney who lived on Williams Street beyond Gordon Street and the four of us were kind of a gang. I would go out and be gone all day. We would play Army and I didn't have– you made your own rifles out of wood and if you remember you would get cereal in these little boxes. There would be about ten of them in a big box and they were about the size of a walkie-talkie. So you would take those and take a hanger, cut part of the wire and put it for an antenna and that was your walkie- talkie. So we would have war with, it was Nick Grier and Jimmy Hopkins over on Broadway, that was the other gang and we would have fake battles.
DW (Laughter) Where did your family do grocery shopping in town?
DO There was just one store and that was A & P on Main Street. Then another job I had around the time I was graduating from high school was to work at the old Acme which was down by the Armory. My job was to put produce up. So that was a part-time job I had also.
DW Hmmm. What about clothes shopping? Where did they go for that on Main Street?
DO Well, I can't remember. Of course, you had the Hirsch's Men's Store. I don't know where I bought my childhood clothes. Probably my mother bought them at Hutzler's in Baltimore.
DW Ah, ok.
DO I don't know that for sure but I know she was a Hutzler's shopper. DW (Chuckles)
DO One of the things that Captain Jim mentioned in–was my selling of race programs down at the race track. I was about 13 years old and I worked in the office there at the race track and I had the privilege of selling the race programs and I bought my pencils, cut them in half and put erasers on them. I had the clubhouse to myself. So, that didn't go over well with those that were in the grandstands. I was replaced later on and then I went to picking tomatoes.
DW (Chuckles) How long was the racing season at the race track?
DO Seems to me it was like 10 days, if I remember correctly. It wasn't a long season and then you know, Havre de Grace was operating then because I remember we would get horses from Havre de Grace.
DW Now this was the regular races with the jockeys, not the sulkies.
DO Right, this was regular. And then toward the latter part of the summer they would have the fair.
DW Was it similar to the fairs that we see today on Tollgate?
DO Yea, only it was on the fairgrounds, although, they had all the people bring their baked goods and they would have the horse pulls, instead of the tractor pulls, they would have the horse pulls. And they were judging horses and I can remember they had all these
heavy teams of Percherons and Belgium horses and I took my little ole horse. When they were judging single horses and pulled them up in there. Of course, I didn't get a prize but I …
DW (Laughter) But I would also like to spend some time talking about your siblings who had some service in the county.
DO Let's start at the top. Put the record straight. My older sister is Betty O'Neill and she married Charles McComas who was one of your living treasure interviewees. They lived most of their time on a sailboat between Bel Air and Florida– Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Then the next one is Brother John, who was in the war and he served on a ship as a gunnery officer and then came here and started farming. Initially, the farming was done on our twenty acres. Then he bought a farm on Hall Street, at the end of Hall Street which is now a development near where the Noyes Farm is. Then he bought the farm now which is on Grafton Shop Road, so during his whole life he was a farmer but then he became an auctioneer and then he was the first– before that he was a County Commissioner and then when– I don't know the date– but when we became a Charter Government, he was the first Council President. Then he tried to run for County Executive against Charlie Anderson and, of course, that was during the Nixon years and we know that it was difficult for a Republican to get any office. He probably could have gotten re-elected as the County Council President but not as the County Executive.
DW It was still a close election from what Mr. Mahan wrote up. So who was next?
DO Next was my sister Peggy. She married Buckner Creel who lived up in Darlington and as an aside, my brother, Tom married his sister, Connie Creel. Buck was in the military and spent all of his life so Peggy was a military wife and travelled with Buck. They raised
five children and then Tommy was part of Harford County that would be of interest. When he served in World War II as a meteorologist and actually helped predict the weather for the invasion of Normandy because he was in Wales there at the time. Then when he came home he stayed in the Naval Reserve and was a clerk or assistant for my father when he was down in Annapolis as a State Senator. He was studying for his law degree and he had just a semester to complete when they called him back into the Navy during the Korean War. He elected to stay in the Navy. He couldn't get out of the– he had to join the regular Navy as a Lieutenant or stay in the Reserve as a Lieutenant Commander so he elected to join the regular Navy. He got his Master's Degree in Meteorology and his PhD in Meteorology and retired and lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Then the next one is Jimmy and my brother Jim just passed away at the age of 86 and he was a lawyer here in Harford County. He made Town Commissioner and eventually served several tours as Mayor.
DW Of Bel Air.
DO Yes, of Bel Air.
DW Yes.
DO And then the next one is Nancy and that was my sister and [who lived] with my father and mother progressing in age, Nancy stayed home to kind of help take care of the household there Williams Street till their passing. Then she moved to Holton, Maine, after that. And that brings you to yours truly.
DW Number seven?
DO Eight.
DW Eight? Oh, I miscounted somewhere… oh
DO Betty, Johnny, Peggy, Tommy, oh! I missed one.
DW We missed Harry. That's why I only had seven. (Laughter)
DO I'm sorry. Between Tommy and Jimmy– how could I forget Brother Harry? Harry served in World War II as a Sergeant and he actually fought in the Battle of the Bulge and stepped on a landmine. Fortunately, it was a shoe mine buried in the snow and so it only destroyed part of his foot. But there was some thought that he might lose his leg but he didn't. Then he went to school, law school, got his law degree and he was in with my father as a lawyer and spent his whole life as a lawyer until– and he became a magistrate– when they had the old Magistrate System. Then when they were converted to District Judges, he became a fulltime District Judge in the Risteau Building on Bond Street. He had a farm in Fallston and about 15 years ago, he was one of the first residents of Oak Crest down on Walther Boulevard and still lives there now. He also, while he was living in Fallston, became an ordained deacon at St. Mark's Catholic Church.
DW And then worked at Oak Crest, right?
DO Yes and at Oak Crest he was very active in the diaconate and he unfortunately developed spinal stenosis which made it very painful to walk and when they divided up his duties, it was between twelve and fifteen people that they gave his duties to.
DW (Laughter) Wow! He must have been busy when he was there.
DO I kind of did that too but he claims they were part time; they doled them out to part time people.
DW And the other thing I guess we should have mentioned along the way for our listeners was your brother John, that would be O'Neill Enterprises today in Forest Hill.
DO Yes. And his daughters Aimee and Mary Lou still operate that.
DW Yes and I see that the public service continues with her and she's on the Board of a local, one of the schools. I can't remember which school it is, though.
DO If I may, there's another area I'd like to talk about. DW Please.
DO We started with Humphrey Wilson and being a member of the St. Ignatius Church in 1792 and that has continued down through the years and I am currently a member of St. Ignatius. I had the privilege of being on the building committee for building the new church. Doc Streett and I helped make the week to week decisions with the contractor but our architect brought to us that there were artisans in Peru who made carvings and he thought that we ought to purchase some of our artifacts from there. So we procured a station of the cross, for those that don't know, this is a fourteen picture lighted passion and death of our Lord Jesus. We got the sixth station where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. That was the sixth station. Based on the faith of that one, we paid $500 for it, based on that statue we had carvings of the life of St. Ignatius on the front of our front doors. We have mahogany doors and we have the life of St. [Ignatius] from his birth on, you can follow it in these carvings all the way to his death as you go in the front door. Then we got all the statues, there are four statues: one of St. Ignatius, of the blessed Mother, oh, five! St. Joseph, Mother Seton and the Sacred Heart statue. Then we got a beautiful cross on the front–there's a beautiful cross, about 14, 16 feet tall but almost looks lifelike—a crucifix with Jesus on it. Then, based on drawings that I sent down there, they carved the altar, and the ambo and the lectern and all the chairs. Then the other thing that I think Captain Jim mentioned in his write-up and this was not quite correct, he mentioned the stained glass implying that they came from Peru. They came from Baltimore. We had an
artist who, essentially we looked at about two or three proposals when we were getting our stained glass and the one that impressed us, this fellow proposed having our clere story windows, there are 50 of them. They tell the whole life of Christ through these 50 windows. Then we have two beautiful rose windows and then we have stained glass windows. The design of the windows was taken from the old church. We tried to re- create as much of the old church in the new church as possible. One of my jobs was to see that the architect didn't make it a monument to himself but rather look as if it were built in the late 1700s or early 1800s. The architect essentially designed it as a cathedral. Still today when I go in there, it's just awesome with all the wainscoting and the statues and the stained glass windows. I feel honored to have had some part in the development of the church.
DW The old chapel there is very interesting, too. It's now like a little mini-museum. DO Yes. Well, the chapel is still a functioning church.
DW Mmm hmm.
DO They have Mass in it twice every day. Then to the side of it is where, originally, it may have been the Rectory for that, initially, then it was a school and now it's a museum. A lot of things from the past are displayed there.
DW If I remember right, that's the oldest church in America, isn't it or Catholic Church in America?
DO I think operating. It may not be the oldest but I think it's the oldest operating one. DW Ok.
DO It's on the National Registry.
DW It's a very pretty building. The new building is very pretty, too. You did a nice job on that. So… let me see, as I was setting up equipment and stuff there was one more topic, at least, that I want to have you talk about a little bit.
When you worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground, you were talking about you were there even during the forerunner of the ENIAC Computer. Can you just talk about the changes that you've seen at Aberdeen as far as technology?
DO I went to Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1952, just graduating from college and later in the years, the room that was my office was where the digital analyzer was. I don't think it was operating at that time but some of our main computers was the ENIAC which was the Ballistics Research Laboratories contracted with the University of Pennsylvania, Moore's School of Engineering and Von Neuman was involved with that and that was our first computer. It was operating then when I first went there. Then we had the EDVAC was the next one and it was tubes and it could probably fill about half of this room. It could do not as much as you can do with your little handheld calculators today. It essentially did pluses and minuses and all. [This was followed by the ORDVAC.] Then the last computer that BRL was involved with was called the BRLESC. It was a BRL Electronic Scientific Computer and that was the last one they built that I saw. They got more super computers but they bought them from IBM. Then before I left we had our own personal computers that we finally got, the PCs, and one of the things that, you know it wasn't Al Gore but it was the Army that developed the ARPA Net which was the forerunner to the Internet.
DW The Internet.
DO When we would go on travel, we would have a little computer which was about half or quarter size of today's keyboard. It had an eight line screen with a little keyboard on it and you would have an acoustic device and you would put your phone in it and then you could log onto the computer at Aberdeen Proving Ground and get your email messages.
DW That's pretty good. During your time there, well you spent a lot of time at Edgewood– or Aberdeen, sorry, and I'm not sure what the title of the position was but obviously you had some folks working under you and in the write-up here it says that one of your staff actually testified at the Warren Commission investigation of Kennedy–
DO That was one of my cohorts. He had the Infantry branch and I had the Artillery branch and I remember the day that Kennedy was shot and one day I went into our security office and there was this box. Inside was Oswald's rifle. It was in that box. We would test it to see how many rounds that they could get off.
DW Hmm.
DO But if you're interested I went in in 1952, I went in and worked in the Armored Area and Tank Warfare for three years. Then my deferment became 1A and I had joined the Reserves so I volunteered for active duty and spent two years at Fort Bliss with the Office of Special Weapons Development where we determined the tactics for nuclear weapons and one of the things I remember working on was the damage and safety criteria– how low you could explode a Nuclear Nike Hercules if you had to explode it over the United States. Then I spent a year at General Electric in Philadelphia working on nuclear weapons and then I came back home to Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1958. I was in the Artillery Branch [Special Weapons Evaluation] and worked there where I was a Section Chief and then I became Chief of the Branch. We were the Weapons Systems Lab of the
Ballistics Research Laboratories and they were pulled out and made what one would consider a Weapons Effectiveness Group for the Army. We were the Army Materials Systems Analysis Activity and I became a Chief of AirWarfare Division and for the rest of my career was basically as a Division Chief, Senior Executive, and I worked on things like the Apache Attack Helicopter and Patriot and then in my last three years I transferred– my boss asked me to take over another division– the Reliability Division and then I spent the last three years working on the Reliability of Army weapons. Then I retired in 1986 [1989], and for ten years I was a consultant to Ballistic Missile Defense in Alexandria, Virginia. I retired the second time in 2002 and worked on one of my loves which– I'll have to back up on you now– in 1982, I got my Real Estate License. The reason I got my Real Estate License was my father had property all over Harford County and it was in his estate, this was '82, he died – well, my mother died in 1967, so all that time this land was just languishing there. So, I kind of took the initiative and met with Jimmy, Tommy, and some of my brothers and we decided to put them on the market and I became the real estate representative for the family and help sell all the property. While I was doing this, Brother John says I have my farm I want to sell, why don't you market that too? I happened to be talking to my brother, Harry, who is a lawyer and he said you can't do that. You're selling real estate without a license; if you're working for your brother. So I went off and got my real estate license and practiced part time over the years and I went with Harry Hopkins who is not the Register of Wills, but Harry G. Hopkins in Churchville who was a farmer in Darlington. And with my love of land, I worked mostly on selling land throughout the county. Two recent sales, one was– I think was originally Hackley Reserve and now it's Magnolia Reserve which is a large townhouse
development in Joppa and Perryman Station which is a housing development– apartments for subsidized senior housing.
DW So let's talk a little bit about– obviously land sales, traffic and people and everything as one of the big changes in the county. So, can you talk a little bit about changes that you've seen that you like?
DO The changes that I've seen that I like – no, I see a lot of changes that I don't like. DW Well, ok, that's pretty typical of the folks I talk to.
DO When I first went to work for Harry we had a contract which was a legal paper front and back and now I prepare a contract and they're 40 pages with about a 14 or 15 page contract with all kinds of addendums and you have to almost read a customer their Miranda Rights to tell them that you either work for them or for the seller and that kind of stifles you right off the bat. One of the interesting things that –I also do appraising. And as an appraiser I remember doing some commercial appraising on Route 40 and I couldn't come up with a price. I had all these different comparables and I did the per acre price so I plotted them on a piece of graph paper and low and behold they fit in a straight line and I could pinpoint the price of the land that I was selling. So I started doing appraisals using regression analysis which is a mathematical technique to estimate the price of a property for which you don't have an exact comparable. It particularly works in land sales. Another interesting thing is we were doing the bubble. We would watch the value of houses go up and I would plot those on a graph and they would be going along and then the value would go up and my associate Tim Hopkins said they're going to come back down to meet what was this straight line projection and low and behold today
prices have come back down and are basically on that original glide path of appreciating about 5% a year.
DW That's interesting.
DO The things I guess I do like is when I first went there your listings would be in a yellow box. Everyday would be delivered these sheets, then you would have to put them in folders and keep tabs of them. And today, you have your listings on the computer and we had our tax maps and if you wanted to give somebody a tax map, you had to put it on the copying machine and explode it, essentially, enlarge it. Now I can go on with the program that I have from the State of Maryland and I can get any size tax map I want and can put soils maps on it or contour maps or aerials maps on it. So yes, that's a –the technology associated with real estate is fantastic. In fact, now and I am almost falling behind the times, you have them now on your phones and I'm not quite ready to go there yet.
DW Well, let me see. I think the only thing that I skipped in my list of normal questions and I'd have to back you up at this point is what did you do for entertainment in your youth.
DO Well,
DW Other than playing soldier.
DO Well, I was going to go with modern youths and we've overlooked a significant part of my life. It's last but not least. When I was sixteen years old there were five boys that ran around town. There was Charlie Smith; there was Carl Hamby, Paul Neeper, and Francis Vander Wiele. And we were kind of a group and stayed together, as an aside, ever since because every year at New Years we've gotten together since 1955, even though three of them, unfortunately, have passed away. But Carl and I were good friends and we were
noted for dating sisters. He was dating Lucile Dalton and she got her sister [Mary Ellen] to go out with me and this was on the 7th of May 1950. We went to the Mason-Dixon Speedway for stock car races. Mason-Dixon Speedway is no longer there but it was just over the line on Route 1 going toward Oxford.
DW Ok.
DO Then that was it ever since. We went together for five years and when I was home from basic training and thought I was headed for Ft. Monroe, we were driving down the road and I said– of course, I had given her a ring several years before– and I said, "Let's get married." So that was a Thursday, we were married on the following Tuesday and the next thing we knew when I reported in to Ft. Monroe, Virginia, they said, "Oh, you're the one that's supposed to be in Ft. Bliss, Texas." They had made a mistake on my orders and so the next thing we knew the following week we had an all-expense paid honeymoon to Ft. Bliss, Texas, and we spent two years there. When we came back we went to Philadelphia, then we lived on Eastern Avenue in my brother Jim's house for a year and in 1959, we moved into this house, here on Lakeside Drive and have lived here ever since. We have three children, Mark O'Neill was born in 1957, he's in the radio business and he lives in Marina Del Ray, California. I have a son, Howard, who is an engineer. Started out as Civil Engineer and wound up as an Agricultural Engineer. He worked for a lot of the engineering firms here in town. He lives in West Virginia. My youngest daughter, Mary Lynn, lives in Glenville. One thing of interest there was that they were building her house and my son-in-law's father, his uncle, his brother, my son-in-law and I built their house. It took us about two years to do it.
DW (Chuckles) Very good. Well, is there any other topic that you would like to…?
DO No, I think– I'm willing to answer any questions you have but I think I have covered everything that I had in mind.
DW Well, I think we've gone around the county pretty good and your whole family has certainly made a large contribution to the county. It's been a pleasure, sir.
DO It was a pleasure speaking with you.
DW Okay! I'm going to say thanks very much.